


Set Me Free

by anti_ela



Series: Young Severus Snape [6]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, Unrequited Love, Who hasn't cried about Snape in the middle of the day? At their desk? For like two hours?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-02
Updated: 2019-08-02
Packaged: 2020-07-29 16:56:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20085622
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anti_ela/pseuds/anti_ela
Summary: Some people divide love by type: platonic, familial, sexual, romantic. For Severus, who had been loved so little, love was impossible to categorize. It was only overwhelming, everywhere, filling everything.





	Set Me Free

**Author's Note:**

> Further title theft from "Who Shall Deliver Me?" by Christina Rossetti, the no. 1 Snape poem of all time.

Some people divide love by type: platonic, familial, sexual, romantic. For Severus, who had been loved so little, love was impossible to categorize. It was only overwhelming, everywhere, filling everything.

Severus loved Lily Evans, and then he loved Lily Potter, and then he loved her memory. If you had asked him how he loved her, he would have said "always," or "completely," or something else that did not truly answer what you meant.

Harry Potter did not need to know this. He did not need to know his mother was loved by anyone so hateful as Severus Snape. The boy needed only to die.

But no one should die without knowing Lily. But the world should not go on if no one upon it loved her to the depths of their abyssal soul.

So Severus gave up his summer days. He gave up flowers and swings, smiles meant only for him. He gave up the way her eyes changed before she laughed, the way she held herself back to walk with him, the way she flew. He gave up how she protected him, how she stood up to him. How good she was. How good and kind and brave she was.

Memories flowed from him, as bright a silver as every doe he had ever conjured from them.

And when she was gone, he looked at her son, bloodied and weary, brave and doomed. Not James reborn; not Lily, either. Dying, he saw Harry. Just Harry. Just a boy who would die for the same reason Severus had lived, because it was needed, because he was asked.

It was done. Let him at last be done. And, emptied of blood, of purpose, of memory, he was.


End file.
